This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs , CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios , delivered on June 12 , 2005 . I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world . I never graduated from college . Truth be told , this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation . Today I want to tell you three stories from my life . That’s it . No big deal . Just three stories . The first story is about connecting the dots . I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months , but then stayed around as a drop – in for another 18 months or so before I really quit . So why did I drop out ? It started before I was born . My biological mother was a young , unwed college graduate student , and she decided to put me up for adoption . She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates , so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wif e . Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl . So my parents , who were on a waiting list , got a call in the middle of the night asking : ‘ We have an unexpected baby boy ; do you want him ? ‘ They said : ‘ Of course . ‘ My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school . She refused to sign the final adoption papers . She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college . And 17 years later I did go to college . But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford , and all of my working – class parents ‘ savings were being spent on my college tuition . After six months , I couldn’t see the value in it . I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out . And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life . So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK . It was pretty scary at the time , but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made . The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me , and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting . It wasn’t all romantic . I didn’t have a dorm room , so I slept on the floor in friends ‘ rooms , I returned coke bottles for the 5 ¢ deposits to buy food with , and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple . I loved it . And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on . Let me give you one example : Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country . Throughout the campus every poster , every label on every drawer , was beautifully hand calligraphed . Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes , I decide d to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this . I learned about serif and san serif typefaces , about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations , about what makes great typography great . It was beautiful , historical , artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture , and I found it fascinating .
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life . But ten years later , when we were designing the first Macintosh computer , it all came back to me . And we designed it all into the Mac . It was the first computer with beautiful typography . If I had never dropped in on that single course in college , the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts . And since Windows just copied the Mac , it’s likely that no personal computer would have them . If I had never dropped out , I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class , and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do . Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college . But it was very , very clear looking backwards ten years later . Again , you can’t connect the dots looking forward ; you can only connect them looking backwards . So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future . You have to trust in something — your gut , destiny , life , karma , whatever . This approach has never let me down , and it has made all the difference in my life . My second story is about love and loss . I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life . Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20 . We worked hard , and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $ 2 billion company with over 4000 employees . We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier , and I had just turned 30 . And then I got fired . How can you get fired from a company you started ? Well , as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me , and for the first year or so things went well . But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out . When we did , our Board of Directors sided with him . So at 30 I was out . And very publicly out . What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone , and it was devastating . I really didn’t know what to do for a few months . I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me . I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly . I was a very public failure , and I even thought about running away from the valley . But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did . The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit . I had been rejected , but I was still in love . And so I decided to start over . I didn’t see it then , but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me . The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again , less sure about everything . It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life . During the next five years , I started a company named NeXT , another company named Pixar , and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife . Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film , Toy Story , and is now the most successful animation studio in the world . In a remarkable turn of events , Apple bought NeXT , I returned to Apple , and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance . And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together .
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple . It was awful tasting medicine , but I guess the patient needed it . Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick . Don’t lose faith . I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did . You’ve got to find what you love . And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers . Your work is going to fill a large part of your life , and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work . And the only way to do great work is to love what you do . If you haven’t found it yet , keep looking . Don’t settle . As with all matters of the heart , you’ll know when you find it . And , like any great relationship , it just gets better and better as the years roll on . So keep looking until you find it . Don’t settle . My third story is about death . When I was 17 , I read a quote that went something like : ‘ If you live each day as if it was your last , someday you’ll most certainly be right . ‘ It made an impression on me , and since then , for the past 33 years , I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself : ‘ If today were the last day of my life , would I want to do what I am about to do today ? ‘ And whenever the answer has been ‘ No ‘ for too many days in a row , I know I need to change something . Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life . Because almost everything — all external expectations , all pride , all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death , leaving only what is truly important . Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose . You are already naked . There is no reason not to follow your heart . About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer . I had a scan at 7 : 30 in the morning , and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas . I didn’t even know what a pancreas was . The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable , and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months . My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order , which is do ctor’s code for prepare to die . It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months . It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family . It means to say your goodbyes . I lived with that diagnosis all day . Later that evening I had a biopsy , where they stuck an endoscope down my throat , through my stomach and into my intestines , put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor . I was sedated , but my wife , who was there , told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery . I had the surgery and I’m fine now . This was the closest I’ve been to facing death , and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades . Having lived through it , I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept : No one wants to die . Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there . And yet death is the destination we all share . No one has ever escaped it . And that is as it should be , because
Death is very likely the single best invention of Life . It is Life’s change agent . It clears out the old to make way for the new . Right now the new is you , but someday not too long from now , you will gradually become the old and be cleared away . Sorry to be so dramatic , but it is quite true . Your time is limited , so don’t waste it living someone else’s life . Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking . Don’t let the noise of others ‘ opinions drown out your own inner voice . And most important , have the courage to follow your heart and intuition . They somehow already know what you truly want to become . Everything else is secondary . When I was young , there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog , which was one of the bibles of my generation . It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park , and he brought it to life with his poetic touch . This was in the late 1960 ‘ s , before personal computers and desktop publishing , so it was all made with typewriters , scissors , and polaroid cameras . It was sort of like Google in paperback form , 35 years before Google came along : it was idealistic , and overflowing with neat tools and great notions . Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog , and then when it had run its course , they put out a final issue . It was the mid – 1970s , and I was your age . On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road , the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous . Beneath it were the words : ‘ Stay Hungry . Stay Foolish . ‘ It was their farewell message as they signed off . Stay Hungry . Stay Foolish . And I have always wished that for myself . And now , as you graduate to begin anew , I wish that for you . Stay Hungry . Stay Foolish . Thank you all very much .